The always interesting Brendan O’Neill has written an article called Why I hate slackers. As is often the case, I see things rather differently:
As always the 1960s has a lot to answer for. The hippies of the anti-Vietnam War brigade were the original slacker generation. There were no doubt some positive elements in the opposition to the Vietnam War – there were some anti-imperialists in there, who were keen to kick interfering America in the teeth and to defend independence and democracy in Vietnam.
I am anti-imperialist because I do not think it is right to impose non-consensual force backed rule on other people at bayonet point. That is also why I am anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-socialist, anti-statist conservative, anti-democratic (at least in the sense Brendan uses the word) and above all, anti-political. All these things are based on intermediation-by-force.
Today, such slackerdom is writ large across society. Today’s privileged youth don’t seem to believe in anything very much. Among the young, membership of political parties is breathtakingly low
The very essence of modern democratic politics is that it is okay to collectively use the state to by-pass normal contractual relationships between individuals and redistribute wealth in certain ways, which is a euphemism for forcibly stealing private property. That so few people should join political parties is a sign of the incremental de-legitimisation of this entire process. Splendid!
very few teenagers and twentysomethings, in both America and Britain, are signing up for the military; even in the private sphere, young people are staying at the parental home for longer and are putting off getting married and having children until much later in life, if not altogether.
In reality, this is just a return to the historical norm: prior to World War II, except during major wars themselves, both Britain and the USA maintained small non-conscript professional militaries. The large peacetime militaries of the cold war era were aberrations. As for living at home, this is largely a function of caring statists ‘helping’ the housing market with rent controls that are a dis-incentivization to rent out properties in the first place, planning regulations that discourage new building, high levels of taxation etc.
As for not having children, exactly what is so bad about that? Women are not baby factories and actually want more from life than just to reproduce. Having children is a choice, not an obligation.
Some might see these as positive developments – as signs that young people are not prepared to go along with the mainstream and are refusing to do what the authorities expect of them. But when such opting out seems to be driven more by insecurity and uncertainty than by a determination to do things differently, how positive is that? So to slackers everywhere: get a life. And a job. And a home of your own. And some conviction. And…
The world is an insecure place and if people are acting accordingly, that suggests to me an outbreak of realism. The statist world view of the left and right within which Brendan seems to be operating is the meta-context of stasis, in which the certainty and predictability of the collective replaces the messy dynamism and uncertainty of an increasingly apolitical world in which people are more concerned for their own interests.
By looking at ‘slackerdom’, Brendan has actually touched on one of the societal manifestations of two important opposing forces at work: as the state imposes itself (i.e. intermediates politics) into private life in ever more pervasive ways, non-state based apolitical spontaneous network effects are pulling hard in the opposite direction by allowing people to manage information in ways previously only available to the top of the pyramid.
There are very good reasons more and more people are not dutifully tramping down the treadmill of life in the manner those whose views rely on planning want them to. Slackers have conviction, Brendan: they have the conviction that what they want as individuals actually matters regardless of what other people think they should do.
